[John Petrella]: Hello, everyone, and welcome to your show, Medford Happenings, a show for and about the city of Medford. Today, we got a very, very special guest with us, Mr. Rich Cormier, who was a teacher at the electrical department at the Medford Vocational Technical High School. Rick, thank you for coming to the show. My pleasure. Thank you. It's great to have you. A lot of great things happen at the vocational school and Rich is here to give us some good examples of exactly what's going on at this great school. So Rich, first question I'd have to ask you is how did you get into this? The teaching end, and how long have you been doing it?
[SPEAKER_05]: Actually kind of by accident. I had always thought about teaching. I graduated from here in 1975. I went on and had a career for about 30 years. And one of my apprentices, I bumped into them one night, Tony Puccio, friend of the show, mentioned that he had been teaching evening school. and told me I should give them a call, because they were always looking for teachers. It was something I wanted to try. So I gave them a call, and they were dumb enough to hire me. And the night school was here at the high school, and it turns out one of the electrical teachers was retiring. And so Tom Ritchie, who was the lead teacher at the time, came and found me one night and asked me if I was interested in getting into this full time. And it took a lot of thinking because you take a massive pay cut when you do something like that. Teaching doesn't pay what being an electrician pays. So my wife and I decided it would be a good move. Time for me to leave the trade and do something different with my life. And so at the age of 50, I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. And so I've been doing that now since 2007. So I've been doing, this is my 18th year of teaching. Something I love, I'm very passionate about it. I still do the nighttime teaching also. And it's just something I really enjoy.